Lost Maine Coastal Schooners: From Glory Days to Ghost Ships

Being From Maine and Portland Harbor

Although this author was born long after the end of the age of sail, I still got to see what had washed up in its wake. I witnessed its aftereffects, like the debris that comes ashore after a turbulent storm. I found it scattered in bits and pieces all around me like the parts of a puzzle that I would have no hope of envisioning in its entirety—but a puzzle that was captivating nonetheless.

My grandmother’s family came from Portland, so off to Portland we would go from time to time to visit her parents. Their house on Portland’s Western Promenade was unmistakably Victorian: brick with a tower and a spire. Born during the latter part of the nineteenth century, my great-grandparents were unmistakably Victorian, as well. Interestingly, their home was located within sight of the tomb of the family of the great nineteenth-century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They occupied the kitchen most often, and the focus of the room was a large window overlooking the Fore River at the mouth of Portland Harbor. That’s where my great-grandfather used to sit and watch the ships coming and going.

Grandpa Martin? I asked. How come you always look out the window?

He turned and smiled. Well, ’cause there’s lots to see.

What?

He bent over, picked me up and sat me on his knee. He wore long sleeves and a dark vest with a pocket watch in it. He had a bit of a belly, and his white hair hanged down at the sides of his head. He wore glasses.

Can’t you see what’s out there? he asked.

I looked out the window. It was sunny, and the light came in and flooded the room. I see boats.

A-yeah. Boats. Ships. I like to watch them come and go out of the harbor.

I looked. There was something calming about it all: the ocean, the waves, the ships being nudged by tugboats—all seemed to be part of a rhythm.

When I was a young man, I used to sail out of this harbor to England. Then I purchased apples for a produce company here in Portland. Now I just sit here in this chair and watch the ships come and go.

When I looked out of the window again, I realized why he sat there. I, too, was becoming mesmerized by the view out the window—the rhythm of the sea and the thought of sailing ships and such. For a moment, I wondered. If I tried hard enough, could I see the old sailing ships, too?

Days turned into years, and years into decades, and I still remember my great-grandfather looking out of the window to Portland Harbor and out to the sea. I knew that he was watching the old sailing ships, vessels that had turned to dust, except in his mind. Now it was he who had turned to dust, except in my mind. And what of the old ships he had so fondly recalled?

Being from Maine, in proximity to those who have a reverence for the sea, I was spared no detail of my heritage. I recalled hearing stories about the other side of the family. The stories were about my great-great-great-grandfather, Captain William Peachey, who was a shipmaster throughout much of the nineteenth century. He was born on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1805 and lived in Belfast, Maine, for most of his life. I remembered the ships he lost; one was the schooner Oneco that went aground near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, during a storm in September 1839 with a cargo for Portland. When the wreck was discovered, one man was found dead, lashed to the rigging. Fortunately, the rest of the crew were saved. In particular, I remember a schooner named General Meade that was lost on Green Island Ledge near Portland on December 12, 1876, with a cargo bound for Boston. Ancestor Peachey was seventy-one years old then and still a master of schooners.

I imagined that the icy, wintry waters off Portland Harbor in December must have been unbelievably cold. What kind of a man, I wondered, would have wanted to be out at sea that late in his life during an ungodly and frigid New England winter? Could it have been that there on the ocean, standing on the wooden deck of a Maine coastal schooner, he felt the most alive?

I did not appear on this planet until long after the last coasting schooner was scuttled or laid to rest and left to rot. I would not have known of the existence of such ships if I had not been from Maine or if I had not caught a glimpse of the remaining Wiscasset Schooners in their final berth in the summer of 1964 when I was just four years old. There was something about the wooden weather-beaten vessels—ambassadors of another era sitting mired in the muck at low tide—that seized my attention and compelled me to stare.

Never able to shake my fascination with the old four-masted vessels, I would return to Wiscasset from time to time just to visit them and stare at them, spellbound, as I did when I was a child. They were still haunting me. I wrote a book of poetry, Simply This, which included a poem entitled Wiscasset Schooners. What surprised me was the number of people who, after reading or listening to the poem, told me that they had heard of the ships, seen the ships, photographed the ships or simply identified with them in some way.

The schooners continued to haunt me. I knew that I could find no rest until I captured the ships more thoroughly, tried to do them justice somehow or tell their story. I became increasingly interested in Maine commercial schooners of all sorts—not just the type that ancestor Peachey sailed or the four-masted vessels waiting in Wiscasset. What of all the other coastal schooners? What has happened to them? Where are they now? Who were the men who built them and sailed them? Why did they persist for so long into the twentieth century, seemingly trying to forestall the inevitable?

There were many large coastal schooners built in Maine in the latter part of the nineteenth century and even more from 1900 until about 1909, the last arriving during the shipping boom of World War I and just afterward. Hundreds of large schooners were built during this time; this is by no means a history of all of them. It is, instead, the story of only some of the vessels, especially those that lingered.

Because of the many references to Portland Harbor in this book, I wanted to consult an authority on the subject. I visited the South Portland Historical Society at its home near Bug Light, located across from Greater Portland’s Eastern Promenade, where the Wiscasset Schooners had rested at anchor in the early ’30s. Called The Bug due to its small size, it is also known as the Portland Breakwater Light and is located in the harbor near the entrance to Fore River. The station was established in 1855, but the present lighthouse was built in 1875. Before I went inside, I wanted to walk down to the sea and look across the harbor. It was January, and the wind whipped across my face, as if to question my intention. I thought of ancestor Peachey and his shipwreck near that very same harbor in the winter of 1876. I was quite sure that the same wind had challenged him on an infinite number of occasions.

The director of the South Portland Historical Society, Kathryn DiPhilippo, welcomed me and spoke of Portland Harbor.

I used to sail with my parents in this harbor when I was a child, she explained. Over there near Fort Gorges, I remember seeing the masts of a ship sticking up out of the water at low tide.

Fort Gorges was named for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, deemed the Lord Proprietor of Maine by King James I of England. Although he never set foot in the New World, Gorges was a sponsor of the Waymouth Expedition in 1605 and a sponsor of Popham Colony in 1607, both in Maine. In 1623, King James granted six thousand acres of land to Christopher Levett, an associate of Gorges’s, so that he would establish an English colony there. The six thousand acres of land, known as Machigonne or Great Neck by the Wabanaki people who inhabited the area, is known today as Portland Harbor and Casco Bay. Levett left the colony after only one year, leaving some of his men behind. They were never heard from again.

Subsequent attempts to settle the area were eventually successful, despite the many times that they were destroyed and then rebuilt. In 1676, the village was annihilated by the Wabanaki people in King Philip’s War, it was demolished again in 1690 during King William’s War and it was shelled and burned by the British in 1775 during the Revolutionary War. In 1866, much of Portland was again destroyed by fire, this time through carelessness during a Fourth of July celebration. Portland was then rebuilt with brick, taking on a distinctly Victorian appearance, which it retains today. The image on Portland’s city seal is that of a phoenix rising from ashes, with the accompanying motto Resurgam, Latin for I will rise again. This is certainly apt, as Portland has become the largest city in the state of Maine.

History is made daily, and what is more recent replaces that which came before it, coming to us and leaving like the ebb and flow of the tides—or of time itself. The last remnants of an earlier age are all but gone, and this author who first glimpsed them as a small child is now a half-century old. It is time, again, to recount the story of the Wiscasset Schooners and their brethren.

The Virginia of Sagadahoc and Popham Colony

The majesty of the great sailing vessels…the romance and reality of a life made at sea, with its breathtaking beauty, absolute tranquility and furious, raging tempests…the square-riggers, Downeasters and, especially, the schooners…the men who built them and the men who sailed them…the jagged, rock-strewn coastline…all of these defined Maine for so long.

To fully appreciate the culmination, the peak, and then the inevitable decline, we must first envision the phenomenon as a whole, from beginning to end. There were shipbuilders in Maine long before there were Pilgrims at Plymouth. There were English shipbuilders in Maine in August 1607, thirteen years before the group that included the Pilgrims landed at what was to become the Plymouth Colony and just a few months after the settlement of Jamestown.

The rugged territory of Maine, way back when it was known as Northern Virginia, was a wild, unexplored wilderness laden with native peoples and primeval forests. It was these very forests, and the possibility of a lucrative fur and precious metal trade, that interested King James I of England and his recently established Virginia Company of Plymouth. The intention of this business venture was to determine if the resources in this New World were exploitable.

In the summer of 1605, an expedition of twenty-nine men sent by prominent investors came ashore at what